Pinch the Botox In

The billion-dollar beauty drug was not always used for reducing wrinkles. Botox, as we know, is a neurotoxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and is used to reduce facial wrinkles and is a huge moneymaker in the cosmetics industry. In 1987, Vancouver doctors Jean and Alastair Carruthers accidentally discovered cosmetic properties in botox toxin which was generally used by ophthalmologists. The couple’s discovery changed the face of beauty.

Dr Jean Carruthers is an ophthalmologist who shared her office with her husband Dr Alastair Carruthers, a dermatologist; she treated pediatric disorders along with adult conditions such as blepharospasm (an uncontrollable blinking and spasming of the eye and surrounding area). Blepharospasm was treated with a dilute solution of botulinum toxin, which, injected into the skin, temporarily paralyses the spasming muscles. One day, as Jean recalls, one of her blepharospasm patients became irate that her forehead was not being injected. “But your forehead isn’t spasming,” Jean responded, and asked why she cared. “Because when you inject my forehead,” the patient said, “my wrinkles go away.”
Jean discussed this with husband, and they decided to test it out. The next day, they talked their receptionist into being the first guinea pig for the cosmetic use of botulinum toxin. “I had the patients, Jean had the toxin”, said Alastair after he saw the results.

When they presented their results at the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery meeting in Orlando in 1991, people said that their ‘crazy idea’ was not going anywhere. But slowly their audience grew and was accepted everywhere and as Jean said: “there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle now”. Since then, Botox has become a billion-dollar industry and the inspiration behind a crowded new generation of fillers, intense-pulsed-light and radio-frequency therapies, and other age-fighting products.